Rosemary Mayer: Ways of Attaching
Ways of Attaching is the first institutional survey exhibition of American artist Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014)
Installation View by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
The exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s work, moving from early conceptual experiments of the late 1960s through to textile sculptures and drawings in the early 1970s, before focusing on propositional performances and temporary monuments made 1977-1982.
Installation View by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Highlighting Mayer’s formal interest in draping, knotting and tethering, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s process of constructing real and imagined networks and constellations, in which friends and historical figures feature in expressions of affinity and attachment.
Installation View by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Mayer was born in Brooklyn, NY, and lived in New York City all her life.
The earliest works included in the exhibition explore rule- and process-based systems, as well as record-keeping of small everyday occurrences, and were made in the late 1960s in an atmosphere of ferment surrounding conceptual art.
Untitled (1968) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Several of Rosemary Mayer’s earliest drawings depict textiles and fabrics, including these sketchbook drawings of a kneeling figure’s dress folding gently around a body without head or hands, and of five clothespins that attach a sheet to a washing line.
Untitled (1968) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Included are several contributions to the journal 0 To 9 (1967-9), edited by her sister, the poet Bernadette Mayer, and her then-husband, the artist Vito Acconci, as well as drawings of garments, and laundry drying on a line.
Untitled Satin & Paint (1970) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
In 1971, Mayer began creating wall-based works by layering multiple fabrics, as well as working on drawings of “impossible” fabric sculptures that were connected by multitudes of knots and loops.
She began pulling raw canvases away from their stretchers to let them hang loosely before abandoning the stretchers and tacking the canvas and other fabrics directly to the wall: twisting, threading, staining and painting them, as in Untitled Satin and Paint.
Galla Placidia
In 1972, Mayer became one of co-founders of A.I.R. Gallery, the women’s cooperative gallery, together with nineteen other women, including Judith Bernstein, Agnes Denes, Harmony Hammond, Howardena Pindell, and Nancy Spero.
Galla Placidia (1973) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
In 1973, for her solo exhibition there, Mayer exhibited three large textile sculptures named after historical female figures: Hiroswitha, The Catherines (named for a multitude of women) and Galla Placidia, named after a 5th century Roman Empress.
Galla Placidia (1973) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
This naming system was a deliberate feminist gesture by Mayer, which, she wrote, was an “attempt to connect the works with women in history, not sculpture as picture of, but as hint to, reminder of, groups of characteristics.”
Installation View by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Balancing employs a hanging system of rods and cords to support two sections of draped fabric, connected by a length of dyed cheesecloth that passes between them.
Balancing
Balancing employs a hanging system of rods and cords to support two sections of draped fabric, connected by a length of dyed cheesecloth that passes between them.
Balancing (1972) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
The sculpture possibly relates to the drawing Abracadabra Sailboat (1972), on the wall nearby, and the use of cords to create lines that describe and frame the fabric suggests some relationship with the act of drawing.
Installation View (1971) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
In 1971, Mayer began to make drawings of imaginary fabric constructions that she described as “impossible” pieces.
She wrote in her journal that this method of drawing allowed her to play with “colors and all the possibilities of draping, tying, sewing etc. without $ and… unfettered by space and size.”
Installation View (1972) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Net Section (1972), De Medici (1972) and Hypatia (1972) are textile sculptures that no longer exist, though photographic documentation suggests that the drawings were made after the sculptures as forms of documentation.
Installation View (1972) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Mayer created a series of drawings based on the way that garments carry the gestures of their wearers.
Installation View by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Hypsipyle (1973) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Hypsipyle was Mayer’s final work made by draping fabric on a sculptural scaffold. It was named after a mythological queen of Lemnos in Ancient Greece, who refused to kill her father during a great war between men and women and had to flee as a result.
Mayer wrote that the sculpture “dealt with corners – how to get a sculpture out of a corner, how to go across a corner.”
Installation View (1975) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Crescentia is one of a series of sculptures using aluminum screening, which Mayer made to explore formlessness, intending that viewers would not be able to hold a precise image of the work in mind.
Lucretia in Ferrara
Lucretia in Ferrara (1974) refers to the Italian Renaissance noblewoman Lucrezia Borgia. While a storied figure, there are no known portraits of Lucrezia Borgia. Mayer wrote that she was interested in referring “to female presences which exist now only in historical memory.”
The Fifth Angel Sleeve
Solomonic Columns
Fabric for Portae (red) and Fabric for Portae (yellow)
Portae (1974) is a large arched sculpture. In these preparatory drawings for the sculpture, Mayer creates a cartography for the folds of the fabric, drawn from details of late Renaissance paintings including those by Jacopo Pontormo, Matthias Grünewald and Parmigianino.
Untitled (1974) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Installation View (1975) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Following her trip to Europe in 1975, Mayer began connecting her interest in formlessness and dissolution to the work of specific painters such as Pontormo and creating forms in which to express this.
She was particularly struck by Pontormo’s drawings for frescoes in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence that depict a mass of entwined bodies dying in a flood.
She made a series of watercolors depicting somewhat abstract masses of floral forms, often layered with text, which she described as “dissolving” and “impossible,” much like her impossible textile sculptures from a few years prior.
Installation View by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Installation View (1978) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
These five collages are part of a larger, twelve-piece series that forms a calendar of months and seasons.
It established Mayer’s renewed focus on time and the seasons during the later 1970s and includes details that would appear in concurrent and subsequent works, including birthdays, lists of names, flowers in season, constellations and personal memories.
Spell (1977) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Installation View (1977) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Mayer received a CAPS (Creative Arts Public Service) grant in 1976, which included an imperative to create a “public” work.
Having taken renewed interest in historic forms of celebration and pageantry, she created Spell (1977), in which three weather balloons were tied with fabric and ribbons, and installed to fly above the Jamaica, Queens farmers market to celebrate its reopening.
Banner for 41st Street Ghost (alternate version) (1980) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Mayer’s work was included in The Times Square Show (1980) organized by the artists’ group Colab. She contributed the first sculpture from her Ghost series called 41st Street Ghost, in which she used rods to create a frame that was draped with sheets of glassine and plastic.
Installation View (1978) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
These drawings depict the knots that held the balloons to their stakes for Some Days in April. They appear here as a detailed type of performance documentation.
Installation View (1978) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
In April 1978, Mayer conceived of another balloon project, a memorial to her friend Ree Morton, an artist, and her late parents who shared birthdays in April. As she wrote: “The work is a monument for, and to connect, the individuals, flowers, stars, times, on the balloons.”
Moon Tents for Autumn Moon (1982) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
During the late 1970s, she made several works on paper that proposed tents for celebrating the full moon before she created the installation Moon Tent on the roof of the Hobbs House in Lansing, New York in October 1982.
Installation View by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Documentation of Balloon for a Birthday (1978) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Installation View (1983) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
In 1983 Mayer began making watercolor still lifes of flowers and adding bold text to them, rather than the notational scripts that she had previously employed to incorporate writing into her paintings. Several of the phrases summon various states of security and fragility.
Installation View by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Bernadette Mayer wrote Midwinter Day about the day of December 22, 1978. One of the sections included was a list of art movements. In a letter, Bernadette asked her sister to provide her with a “list of all the kinds of things being produced by artists who are contemporary."
Installation View (1979) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Mayer made Snow People in the garden of the Lenox Library, while her sister, Bernadette, was living in the town of Lenox, Massachusetts. For this work, Mayer sculpted fifteen figures from snow, fashioning them with nineteenth century silhouettes.
Researching common names from the town’s past inhabitants, she dedicated each snow person, plurally, to a set of people with a shared name. At the feet of each snow sculpture was a painted wooden sign, reading “Carolines,” “Fannys,” “Sarahs,” and so on.
Connections (1978) by Rosemary MayerSwiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York
Not all Mayer’s “Temporary Monuments” were realized, and many remain as drawings or became what she termed “impossible sculptures.”
For a proposed work called Connections, she planned to fill Castle Clinton, an old fort in Battery Park, with balloons, on which children would paint tributes using her system of name, date, star and flower.
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